The undead vs. the walking dead: We spoke to celebrities who have built a career around the supernatural about this undying debate ...
John Carpenter, photo by Thomas Peter Schulz |
"They're both great. Vampires go way back to when I was a little kid. And back even more to my parent's generation - and back even before them. The zombies are a little more recent. One of my favorite directors and close friends is George Romero and I think he transformed the horror genre with Night of the Living Dead
"Well, I'm kind of partial to some of the Hammer
ELVIRA

"Of course, I have a soft spot in my heart for vampires, because they are dark and sexy like myself. But lately zombies are taking over, man. I love zombies. My premiere show [for new Macabre episodes] was Night of the Living Dead and I haven't seen it in so many years but I think I've seen it 10 times in the last three weeks. I realize how much I love it, and how good zombies are. There's been so many great zombie films out recently. Zombies are kind of taking over for me right at the moment."
"I’m not particularly fascinated about zombies. I sort of backed into it. I didn’t even call them zombies in the first film; I called them flesh eaters. I just wanted some sort of game changing event that my human characters could ignore in favor of petty bickering … My favorite film of mine is a film called Martin. It’s not quite a spoof, but it started as a spoof, and during the course of making the film I started to take it a little more seriously. But it’s my sort of vampire spin."
TOM SAVINI
Makeup artist, director, actor
(Dawn of the Dead (1978, 2004), Night of the Living Dead (1990)
"I had stayed away from the Twilight Saga
"Vampires … they're darker. Zombies have just been infected by some kind of virus. Vampires can do things that zombies can't do. Zombies are just slow kind of slow walking, and just people that moan and groan and just look ugly. Female vampires are sexy as hell. They're just cool, man. They're awesome. They suck blood and make it look cool. They’re attractive, powerful, immortal, you know. Vampires are immortal. Freakin’ zombies you can kill with a freakin spitball, and they’re infected, sick, ill. Vampires are not. And vampires are creatures of the night. And I'm a creature of the night. That's why they're cool."
"Vampires … I do like the Coppola movie [Bram Stoker’s Dracula
] but I also really like the 1931 Todd Browning original
- just because it's the first one … I can't speak with any quality or any conviction on zombies. I just don't do those."
"I have to say, I’m not a zombie fan at all. I’ve never written a real zombie book. I would love to see zombies go away because zombies are so limited. As a writer, there’s so little you can do with zombies. I like surprises and twists, and fooling a reader, but you can’t fool anyone into thinking a zombies isn’t a zombie. What can they do? They stagger."
Actor, Machete
"I love them all ... [my favorite vampire movie is] From Dusk Till Dawn … Zombies? Anything that Rob Zombie does!"